Marita Bonner

Who Was Marita Bonner?

Marita Bonner was one of the most intellectually acute and formally experimental writers of the Harlem Renaissance — a playwright, essayist, and short story writer whose work has been consistently undervalued in relation to her male contemporaries. Born in Boston, educated at Radcliffe, she taught school in Washington D.C. in the 1920s and became part of the Georgia Douglas Johnson salon, one of the central gathering places of the Renaissance’s literary culture.

Her essay “On Being Young — A Woman — and Colored” (1925), published in Crisis, is one of the most powerful statements of the triple bind facing Black women writers of her generation — constrained by race, sex, and the expectations of a movement that was itself not free of sexism. Her plays, particularly The Purple Flower (1928), use expressionist techniques and allegorical forms to render the condition of Black Americans with a precision and anger that her more decorous contemporaries often avoided.

After her marriage and move to Chicago, she published a series of interconnected stories about the Frye Street neighborhood — a fictional Chicago community that became one of the most fully realized social worlds in African American fiction of the 1930s. She stopped publishing in 1941 and spent the rest of her life teaching in Chicago public schools.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• On Being Young — A Woman — and Colored — 1925 — essay
• The Purple Flower — 1928 — play
• Exit, An Illusion — 1929 — play
• Frye Street & Environs — collected stories, posthumous 1987